Social networking and micro-blogging services such as Twitter® and Facebook® provide new avenues for social comment. Such services typically allow users to post comments in a public or semi public forum and for those comments to be forwarded or shared with other groups of users. Such user comment is invaluable for marketers seeking to promote a particular product or lobbyists trying to promote a particular viewpoint as it provides rapid feedback as to how a product is perceived or an indication of popular opinion on a particular matter.
The nature and volume of social media posts, however, makes analysis of such posted information very difficult. Very large numbers of posts are generated and posts are generated by users in an unstructured manner. It is therefore difficult to know other than by reading each individual post what any particular post concerns and how they relate to other posts made by the same or other users. For large numbers of posts such an approach is impractical.
In view of this rather than providing analysis of the content of posts themselves most social media analysis has involved analysis of the links between users.
Thus for example, in the case of Twitter® certain relationships between users can be identified as users can choose to “follow”, that is receive the posts of certain other identified users. The numbers of followers a particular user has is indicative of the extent to which messages posted by that user are likely to spread across the network. Similarly the numbers and identities of users someone chooses to follow can provide an indication of a user's interests, likes and sources of information.
Such analysis does provide some information about how data is spread via social media. However the analysis of links between users provides little if any information about the content of posts which are being shared by those users. Such information would be desirable because if it is possible to determine the types of messages influential users receive and broadcast, marketers could use that information to tailor their messages so that they were more likely to reach particular market segments.